I’ve been and gone and done a third ScreenCast about Windows Phone Application Studio. You can find it here. It is all about data collections in applications and includes some daring C# coding that I’m not sure whether I’m proud of or not.
I’ve tweeted this, but I thought I’d blog it too. This is a really good single page poster that gives you all the Windows phone namespaces.
And this one is very useful too. Thanks to @AllFallDown for the link.
So how come, having said to number one daughter “Don’t let me buy anything else today, or perhaps ever.”, I still end up with a Lego Back to the Future kit?
The skins that I ordered from Decal Girl arrived earlier this week. Each one has on it a link to a download for a background that exactly matches the “hole” in the screen border. This means you can get effects like the one above. I really like this, although if I use the same background for my desktop it makes things confusing, as I try to drag things into side of the device.
If you want to make your devices nicely unique and protect their surface a little (note the play on words there) then I reckon they are well worth a look. The picture, since you asked, is of a rock pool at the seaside on the Isle of Man. I liked the shape of the cracks and the blue sky above.
The second screencast is now available. It is all about data sources and RSS feeds. You can find it here.
You can find both screencasts (and any new ones that I add) here:
If you are having bother getting your invitation code for App Studio I've got one here that might work for you:
MSFTMVP020
I’ve done a little screencast about getting started with Windows Phone App Studio. It covers making and deploying your first application, and actually shows you to build something that is useful. I’ll record a few more over the next week or so. You can find the screencast here.
I've set up a new part of the site for these screencasts. They will all be at:
If you fancy making a Windows Phone application but you’ve not done much programming then you might find the Windows Phone App Studio worth a look. It starts from a web based interface you can use to create applications that bring together your favourite web sites, RSS feeds and lumps of data. You can turn out very professional looking applications with menus, custom lock screens and tiles. What’s more, you can distribute them to any Windows Phone owner who scans the QR code that is produced when your app is built. And the apps that you build can be the basis of Marketplace your Products because you can download the entire solution and add your own behaviours alongside the pre-built ones.
If you are planning a party, want to tell the world about your amazing pizza collection, need to keep track of places you have visited or just want a quick way of finding all your favourite web sites and blogs, then you can create an application of your own to do just that. In around ten minutes or so.
Just had a visit from a Fire Safety person (#nogoodwillcomeofthis)
He didn’t really have to say much. Just look around my office at the collection of daisy chained mains cables, piles of paper and other inflammable detritus lying around the place. So, time for a tidy up methinks. My bin is now full and I can see part of the surface of my desk. And two mains extensions have gone back to the systems team. I also found this rather nice button while I was clearing up. Ongoing.
Ha. Found the other button. Knew I had two.
The minic system in the bridge control room
Little known fact. Since 1998, if you have driven over the Humber Bridge and paid a toll then you have been interacting with some software that I wrote. Ian Bell and myself produced the instation and minic software that has been keeping track of bridge crossings and toll takings. We worked with Siemens Road Traffic Controls who put the hardware into the booths, our code kept track of mis-registrations and printed out the totals tables. It’s been working ever since, with a mid term upgrade and a little problem when it lasted longer than it was supposed to.
And today, just after 5 o’clock in the afternoon, I turned it off forever.
The final moments
The system is being replaced by an altogether more up to date one, which allows for toll payment without stopping, special rf badges and all kinds of new fangled things.
It seems like less and less of my software is being used in the world. For a magical time a few years ago programs I had written were putting datestamps on Budweiser beer and Cadbury’s Roses, passing part programs into machines that cut wing-spars for aircraft, measuring winch lengths on trawlers and flushing toilets in the Reckit and Coleman test labs in Hull. Happy days.
Oh well. Animal Crossing New Leaf has sucked me to its world. Last week I went to visit number one’s town, today I’m saving for the down payment on a house and I’m looking forward to tomorrow night at 7:00 pm when there is the firework display of the year.
Can you spot the difference between this one and the other one. Turns out that I can’t.
My home version of “one usb to rule them all” arrived today. I used my own money to buy this one (just got paid) and I was feeling rather smug, in that I had got it for thirty quid less than the university had paid. Clever me.
Or not. Turns out this is not exactly the same. It only has one video out port, rather than the two that the office device has. The documentation mentions two ports, but that is because there is an adapter in the box, which allows the single port to be used with two different kinds of monitor.
Oh well. It’s not as if I have two monitors at home, or the desk space to stand them on. And I’ve noticed that the DisplayLink software, while quite splendid in that it just works, does steal around 5% of the processor. Which means that two monitors would take a much bigger chunk.
Everything else works just fine though, and it really is nice just to have one plug to worry about. If you regularly connect your laptop to your desktop I reckon this is still a really good bet.
I’ve discovered that one way to make sure that I remember how to do something is to drop it into the blog. That way I can go find it when I forget. This time it is the code that you use to open up the connection settings dialog page in Windows Phone 8.
ConnectionSettingsTask connectionSettingsTask =
new ConnectionSettingsTask();
connectionSettingsTask.ConnectionSettingsType =
ConnectionSettingsType.Bluetooth;
connectionSettingsTask.Show();
This will do the business. You need to include the Tasks namespace:
using Microsoft.Phone.Tasks;
There are options that you can use to open up the WiFi, Cellular and Airplane modes.
Whenever I open the Airplane mode I always want the phone to say
“Surely you can’t be serious?”
”I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley”
As well as the Pacific Rim book (Pacific Rim? Sunday’s Post. You mean you’ve not been to see the movie yet. Shame) I also got a collection of Century 21 comic strips. We used to get TV21 magazine every week, and after dad had finished reading it I was allowed to take a look.
Anhyoo, the Thunderbirds strips were always the best. They were illustrated by Frank Bellamy who was the only one who seemed to be allowed to put his name on the strip. With good cause. I still reckon this was some of the best comic art ever. Don’t believe me? Grab a copy of the book and take a look. There are actually only a couple of Thunderbirds strips in the book, but the other ones are a good bunch too.
And I’ve just found out that there are lots more available too, which could prove expensive…
Slimbridge is one of my favourite places to visit. They have lots of different makes of birds and wildlife and stuff. We went there today and of course I took some photos.
It’s a pity that the camera decided to focus perfectly on the bit behind the butterfly, but I’m still happy with this one.
England in summer. Can’t beat it.
A trip away wouldn’t be a trip away without a silly game or two to play. So I got hold of a copy of Love Letter. The game is beautifully presented in a red carrying pouch, which is just as well as you only get 16 cards for your money. But the game is still super.
Each player takes the role of a potential suitor finding confidantes who will deliver their messages of love to a beautiful princess. During a round you have to find the best person to deliver your message of undying devotion. But you can also knock out other players and swap cards with each other in a way which is great fun. Even if, as for me, most of your cunning moves misfire in a spectacular fashion.
Number one son observes that at the end of the day it is really only about chance and at some points you are really only choosing from one of a number of possible options which all have a similar probability of success. He’s right, but the setting and the way you can knobble people if you get lucky carry the game along to the right side of fun for me. Well worth a look I reckon.
First things first. Pacific Rim is complete rubbish. But it is so complete that it is actually quite wonderful. If you are prepared to make the mental effort to suspend your disbelief somewhere really high (or just leave the critical part of your brain at the door) then you will really, really enjoy it.
If you are able to take on-board “facts” like it requires two melded human brains to control a giant toy robot and that the best way to select pilots for said robots is to to have them try to hit each other with wooden sticks then you will do just fine.
The thing that did it for me was the level of detail and little cultural references that made the daftest parts make sense at the time. The acting is well up to par and everyone gets on with the job in hand with enormous gusto. The computer graphics guys had taken the sensible precaution of making sure that most of the action is either at night, in the rain, underwater or all three at once, so that everything looks properly believable and any necessary bending of the laws of physics is nicely hidden.
If you only go and see one big, daft, movie this summer then it has got to be this one.
I liked it so much I bought the book. Which is very good too.
Anyone can write, just like anyone can cook. As soon as you move from restaurants and ready meals to getting ingredients and mixing them in pans you can start thinking about getting a white uniform and people shouting “Yes chef!” to you across steam filled kitchens. Moving beyond shopping lists and one line Facebook updates means that you can start pondering putting “writer” on your business card and extracting killer quotes from unresponsive interviewees. Or then again, perhaps not, because of course the really important thing is what everyone else calls you.
If you are the only person that thinks you are the next Jamie Oliver then you might have a hard time getting folks to eat your food. And while the internet does provide a potential audience of billions, getting them all to come and read your web site will take more than just your idea of deathless prose. This means that you have to do the hard stuff, like practice and learning how to get better.
I’ve never dared call myself a writer; I’m more someone who throws a bunch of words at a blog post every day to see which ones stick. But today I went along to a Guardian Master class called “Writing with Colour” to find out a bit more about this writing business. There was actually another reason for going as well, the sessions were being given by writers who I’d long admired from afar, and I liked the idea of admiring them from a bit closer up.
There were about 80 or so of us on the course, which took place in the actual Guardian newspaper building in London. The sessions were all great. If you have a low opinion of journalists and editors then you should go along, just to find out how thoughtful and considered these folks are about what they do. I’m pretty sure that not all writers are like this, but these were folks who I’d be happy to listen to all day, which is just as well, because that is what we did.
A few of my thoughts from the sessions:
Read what you have written. Out loud. All the writers took evident pleasure in reading what they had put on the page. This is as confidence thing I reckon and darned good advice. Sometimes you might like what you hear. If you don’t like it, go back and change it until you do.
Be loyal to your work. This can mean a bit of internal wrangling as you seek permission to print that quote from a reluctant interviewee. It might mean you can’t be a totally nice person all the time. And it might mean dropping that wonderful sequence because it doesn’t add anything to the piece.
Always deliver what you were asked for. Someone asked Lucy Mangan what she did if her four o’clock deadline came along and she hadn’t thought of anything to write about. Her reply was brilliant. That. Does. Not. Happen. If you are a proper writer and you are asked to write something that’s what you do. You can wrestle with your inner demons about the content (and you should) after you have pressed the send button, but the important thing is if you are asked for 550 words you should deliver 550, along with a convincing pitch for why you should be allowed another 200 or so.
Always edit, and always cut. The editor is the person who makes things better and tighter, sometimes by cutting out what the writer thought of as the best bits. If we end up losing the traditions of print journalism I reckon the editor is the person we will miss the most. This probably means that writers will have to spend more time editing their own work. So try to do this.
Work at what you write. I was very pleased to find that nobody said that they found writing easy. Everyone said they had to work at it. Interviews take preparation and persistence in writing everything down. Features take research and rewriting. And the work doesn’t stop when the piece is finished, everyone valued re-visiting items and look at why they wrote what they wrote.
Seek out the colour. Work to find that killer fact, or interesting angle, which will give you a hook to hang your words on or will be quoted in the pub by your readers. If you are very lucky the colour will find you, but mostly you find it in the research you did, or the huge pile of notes that you made.
Last week I sent a jaunty tweet to the organisers saying how I was bringing along some crayons, as the subject was “Writing with colour”. I can imagine the sinking feeling in the stomach of the recipient, along the lines of “We’ve got a right one here….” Sorry about that.
Anyhoo, I found the whole affair really stimulating, and if you want to get tips about improving your writing style, and maybe meet a few heroes, then it is well worth the price of admission. And the lunch was good too.
Our car SatNav has a mode where it will give directions over another audio signal, automatically turning down the music/radio or whatever when it wants to tell you want to do. Today we were using it while listening to some comedy on the radio, which worked really well. It was great to hear the machine say “At the roundabout, take the first exit” and then get a huge laugh and a round of applause from the audience.
It’s been a few years since I went mostly mobile. I have a big desktop machine at home, but I only use it when I want to do some space heating, or move some dust around the room. The rest of the time I plug my laptop into network, keyboard, mouse, display, external hard disk and power supply each time I arrive home. It’s a bit of a pain to be honest. Whet I really want is a box which lets me do the connecting thing, but with one cable.
That’s what the Startech Universal Docking station lets me do.A single high speed USB 3 connection gives me keyboard, screen and all the other gubbins except power. It seems to work too. The video connection uses a technology called DisplayLink and lets me connect two external monitors to my lovely Microsoft Surface. There is some cunning compression involved in sending the video, but it seems to work fine with office productivity and software development, along with watching videos. It also makes arriving somewhere a lot easier. I’ve persuaded the folks at work to get me one for the office, and I think I’ll pretty soon have one for home use.
They even have a fake university web site, which is well worth a look.
We went to see Monsters University tonight. A prequel to Monsters Inc,, one of my favourite films ever, it tells the story of how Mike and Sculley got together and started their child scaring career. It’s a good romp, but for me it didn’t have anything like the emotional depth of the first film. There are some great moments and the animation is astonishingly good, but since there was no way it could have the character “Boo” I guess it was always going to be a step down from the original.
Having said all that the short film they showed before the main feature, The Blue Umbrella, was an absolute master class in how to fill a little film with emotion. When you get to this level the fact that the pictures were made using computers seems completely incidental. They just used the tools to make something quite wonderful, and almost worth the price of admission by itself. I really hope it makes it onto the Blue Ray release.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
